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BILLY BOYLE
by James R. Benn
Soho Press, September 2006
304 pages
$23.00
ISBN: 1569474338


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Billy Boyle thought he'd have it all pretty easy. As a member of a Boston Irish family, he joins the police force, as his father and uncles before him. In time-honored tradition, they smooth the way, including a little 'help' here and there. Just in time for the detective's exam, Billy 'finds' the answers to the test in his locker. Well, gee, he could hardly help that, right? So rightly or not, Billy eases his way into the top ranks of the Boston Police Department -- just in time for World War II. And in time-honored fashion again, they pull strings and Billy is given a plum appointment with his uncle. The next thing he knows, he's in London, assigned to the staff of General Dwight Eisenhower.

Billy isn't a total goof-off, but it's evident he has had little interest in hard work. He accepts the efforts of his family to get him into the police and then into this cushy assignment as just the way things are done. He's not stupid, but he's pretty lazy. He has to come to terms with many realities in his new situation -- he sees for the first time, the realities of the war and what's happening in Europe, realizes that lives depend on what he does, and that no one will cover for his mistakes any longer.

As a working-class Irish kid in Boston, he's used to the cronyism and knowing everyone on your block. Suddenly, he's working not only with people with more education, more experiences and more knowledge than he has, but he's also suddenly face to face with royalty, as his assignment puts him to work with Polish nobility as well as the Norwegian government in exile.

Writing a murder mystery within a setting of war and crisis always intrigues me because in so many ways, the world is turned upside down. Often those who otherwise might investigate are away at the battlefields and others pitch in. In societies where class matters, big-time, working class folks can be thrown in with titled peers -- and kings -- and the lines aren't always drawn clearly.

At the same time, many people face responsibility and have to grow up when they weren't expecting that. Those are the strengths of this story. While the actual mystery is okay, it's the stuff of the back story that interested me the most. Watching a lazy guy wake up to his responsibilities and respond to being treated as an adult with experience when he has none (but there's no one he can turn to for help) makes Billy an interesting protagonist.

I warmed to some of the other characters, but they never really got to me, so that I didn't quite buy some of the plot twists. When a major character is killed off, I didn't feel what I'm sure the author wished the reader to feel. Whether that was the writing or my inability to see some of these characters the way they were intended, I simply don't know.

I think in some cases, the author relied a little too often on shortcuts -- on standard characterizations, on types, but to be fair, many of the 'types' were realistic and you know they existed. BILLY BOYLE is well worth reading and I very much want to see what author James Benn writes next

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, October 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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